


Turn the crank, and snap the plank, then boot the marble right down the shoot....

by tobinlaughing



Category: Marvel MCU, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Domestic Avengers, Gen, Home, Mice, brute force and teamwork solve the avengers problems, build a better mousetrap, natasha and thor love cats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 03:44:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1536332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tobinlaughing/pseuds/tobinlaughing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little idea that popped into my head as I was trying to think of new ways to get the mice out of my kitchen. And then I thought (as I do with all things in my life),  "What would the Avengers do?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turn the crank, and snap the plank, then boot the marble right down the shoot....

It's not like they go unnoticed: JARVIS puts a bulletin in Tony's morning report about there being signs of a rodent infiltration in the kitchen of the common floor of the Tower. DUM-E and You dutifully sweep up the little turds and disinfect the surfaces where they're found, but JARVIS' structural and security analyses don't turn up possible places for the mice to make their way into the Tower at all, much less up thirty-five flights of stairs and elevators, so once the notice goes out to Mr Stark the AIs just incorporate it into the daily routine.

Mr Stark, of course, reads his morning reports haphazardly at best and more usually never, so for a solid month nothing more is done about it. The AIs clean up after the human, non-human, and rodent populations in the Tower and everyone believes everything is fine--aside from alien invasions, dark elves, psychotic terrorist despots, and the whole HYDRA thing. The Tower remains a battered but unbeaten bastion in the heart of the city, a place where all of the Avengers believe themselves safe, or at least, in the least danger.

And the there are furious screams and crashing noises from Dr Foster's lab at 1:30 one Wednesday morning, which puts everyone on high-red-alert for about twenty minutes until Darcy explains to the Assembled that she thought the mouse was a spy-bot and of course she tried to taze it, why wouldn't she? And no, she's not _afraid_ of mice; she just hates the idea of something with _no control over its bowel functions_ being in the same room she is. Luckily Darcy is now familiar with how Jane's Radio-Shack-and-duct-tape contraptions go together, so she's able to replace the components she fried. There are three-ish, maybe four days after that where no one is comfortable anywhere in the Tower. Foster's labs are air-locked and sealed, so if a mouse got in there, where else could it get to? Tony puts the AIs on a 26-hour sanitization spree, where they clean every surface and item on those surfaces, stopping short of torching Barton's dirty laundry (You has been programmed _by some sarcastic genius_ to flash the 'foreign contaminant' warning from _Wall-E_ every time it encounters Barton, and that's funny for about an hour and grounds for roboticide an hour after that). DUM-E emerges from Natasha's quarters a scant eight minutes after entering, head hanging in shame, because her rooms are immaculate, perfect, and dust-free already. JARVIS informs Pepper that DUM-E professed robotic envy for Natasha's method of folding and organizing every item she wears. Pepper giggles and has JARVIS keep a running list of reputable exterminators available should the great minds at Avengers Tower come up short in catching the mouse.

Bruce and Jane spend two and a half days designing a better mousetrap, and in that time Natasha slips out to the local animal shelter and comes home with a pair of New York's finest hunters. After a day of grateful cuddles and following her around to wrap around her ankles, Strielka and Kupielle* peel off on the prowl but find nothing more menacing than dust bunnies and Thor's inexplicable and sudden stash of cat toys. The high-tech mousetraps, replete with motion sensors, pheromone and scent bait, no-kill cages and camoflage panels, also remain frustratingly empty. A series of clever snares that Barton designs and implements are also left unsprung, save for the one that shoots a tiny barb into Steve's toast one morning as he's rooting in the back of the pantry for the peanut butter. Steve, for his part, has walked to the corner hardware store and picked up ten old-fashioned snap-traps and baited each one with a sliver of cheese and a scrap of cracker. Strielka springs two before deciding the treat is not worth the trick, but that's it.

After about a week the heroes relax, the specter of infestation giving way to more immediate concerns: missing SHIELD agents, national security threats, aliens. Always aliens. And the AIs continue to sweep up mouse turds, the cats continue to prowl, and JARVIS continues to put reminders in the bulletins Tony continues to ignore. 

Then one morning Steve tears through the common room in his sweatpants and nothing else, a heavy skillet raised and the cats streaking after him, the trio intent on a tiny gray form that races across the immaculate carpet towards the stairwell. Kupielle pounces, her strike fouled by Strielka sliding in to bat the mouse off its feet, and Steve has to quick-step around the sudden roiling ball of battling fur and teeth and ends up crashing into a wall. The skillet clangs to the floor, the cats bolt off to the safety of Natasha's rooms, and the mouse has escaped. In a couple days it is forgotten again.

Every so often Jane or Bruce will tinker with one of their traps, setting new bait, adjusting this or that sensor, or tossing the whole contraption against the wall in frustration to start over. Bruce compiles a huge store of animal-behavior studies that do nothing to help him figure out how to trap this mouse, but he does manage to adapt some of the behavior-modification techniques to get Tony to stop raiding his good tea stash. Barton's snares gather dust, too, the miniature snap-nooses and guillotines poised in corners and along air ducts where he sometimes encounters them, like little forgotten exhibits in a museum of the miniature and macabre. Strielka and Kupielle grow sleek and content, but never fat, under Nat and Thor's watchful and loving care. 

Then, late one night (appropriately dark and stormy, which makes Thor reasonably happy) the thunder god is in the kitchen, retrieving cookies for his beloved (who is reasonably famished after a storm-inspired lovemaking session), when he notices a bare glow in one corner of the counter, behind the toaster oven. He sets the cookies down, cautiously sliding the appliance away from the wall just far enough that he can see behind it. The tile is barely luminescent, like an old-fashioned lightbulb that has just been shut off, but the glow is still there, though fading; but even as he watches, it blinks a bit brighter...and there is a white mouse standing on the tile. 

And he hears a giggle. Far away, but still audible.

**Author's Note:**

> *стрелка and копье = Arrow and Spear, via Google Translate and my own phonetic interpretation from Russian.


End file.
